Don’t Stop Shaving Your Legs.

Shaving your legs sucks. If it’s preparation for a night out you’re bound to cut yourself right in the middle of your shin, resulting in a big red scab or a tacky bandaid. Neither of which are good looks. And no matter how hard you concentrate, you almost always miss one little spot which you won’t notice until after you’ve left the house. It sucks, but we do it anyway. We do it because someone, somewhere, decided it would be a great idea for women to shave their legs. Who was that, anyway?!

But alas, this isn’t about the perils of shaving your legs. It’s about how you shouldn’t stop doing it once you’ve landed yourself a relationship. If anything, it should become more important. I always thought this was a universal understanding. Apparently I was wrong.

See, every now and then I hear loved-up ladies laugh about how they haven’t shaved for weeks. “Haha, the boyfriend just has to put up with it” or worse; “I love when I’m in a relationship, I can stop shaving”. Um, what?! Excuse me, but you CANNOT stop shaving. You’ve got it around the wrong way. When you’re single (and particularly in winter), you can go days, weeks, without shaving because no one is there to be brushing up on your prickly hairs. When you’re in a relationship and someone is thereevery night touching your legs, that’s a reason to have that situation under control.

Of course, that reason is about more than just having smooth, shaved legs. It’s very easy to fall into a carefree, comfortable state but carefree and comfortable aren’t always good things to be. In the beginning, you put in all the hard work, dressing up for dates, making sure your hair sits just right, thinking of something nice you could do for your partner, showering them with sweet nothings, just to make them happy. You care about everything. Just because you’ve gotten comfortable with someone doesn’t mean you can stop putting effort in. This isn’t a case of ‘I’ve won the prize, I can stop trying now’. Relationships require more work, not less.

It’s true that the little things are what make a relationship and it’s these little things that shouldn’t leave the relationship a few months or even years down the track. Hell, if your partner stopped doing all the sweet, caring, little things they did at the start that made you fall for them in the first place, you’d be pissed about it (as would I). We’d declare: “Chivalry is dead! Romance is dead! He used to care!”

So, ladies, let’s not stop shaving our legs. I refuse to fall into this comfortable, no-effort-into-what-I-look-like-anymore state. I can’t help but see it as a gateway to not putting effort into anything else. Instead, I care more about shaving my legs when I’m in a relationship. I care more about dressing up every now and then, wearing something I know he’ll like when we go out. I care about getting him a coffee on Saturday morning before he’s woken up and offering to get out of bed to turn the light off when we’re about to go to sleep. Because, if we continue doing the things we did at the start of the relationship, maybe there’d be no end.